Sifting Through Anatolia's Dark Sins and Bright Cultures

ISTANBUL — Before emerging into the bright colors of Ahmet Gunestekin’s celebration of the diversity of Anatolian cultures, visitors to his exhibition step into the darkness of mourning for its victims.

In a darkened front room of the exhibition, a video installation flashes up the dates of dozens of massacres committed on Turkish soil over the past century, one after another, each accompanied by historical recordings of dirges and laments from the victims’ own period and culture.

Armenian voices are heard wailing when the dates 1909 and 1915 are visible followed by Alevi, Kurdish, Turkish, Greek and other laments. The last date to flash up is 2012, as mothers wail in Kurdish and Turkish for their sons killed on both sides in Turkey’s ongoing war with Kurdish rebels.

“People are a little freaked out by it,” Mr. Gunestekin said in an interview last week in Istanbul. “But I want visitors to pay their respects to the peoples who have inspired my art before they tour the exhibition.”

The show called “Yuzlesme” — best translated as “Facing Up” but blandly rendered as “Encounters” by the catalog — opened in the Antrepo gallery in Istanbul this month under the patronage of Yasar Kemal, the grand old man of Turkish literature and Mr. Gunestekin’s longtime mentor.

It will be there until Dec. 30, before moving on to the Kurdish city of Erbil in northern Iraq next year, followed by Venice, Berlin and several stops in France.

Though Mr. Gunestekin’s work is not included in any Turkish museum collection of contemporary artists, the opening night of his exhibition drew a mix of prominent politicians, business leaders and respected artists that was highly unusual for Turkey. The group included Kurdish nationalist deputies and leading members of the conservative ruling party as well as the Kemalist opposition.

“Turks and Kurds Come Together Over Art,” the Sabah newspaper declared the next day.

“Only art can bring these people together,” said Mr. Gunestekin, who is Kurdish and was raised by an Armenian step-grandmother orphaned in the 1915 expulsions.

Born in the southeastern province of Batman in 1966, he can remember a time when that region was not almost exclusively Kurdish with a smattering of Turkish oil men and administrators — as it is now.

“In my childhood, my neighbors and friends in Batman were Armenian, Syriac, Turkish, Arab — there were people from different cultures and beliefs,” he said. “These people are a part of my art, because I grew up with them.”

For nearly two decades, Mr. Gunestekin has been crisscrossing Turkey with sketchbook and camera, visiting every one of its 81 provinces, more than 700 districts and close to 4,000 towns and villages, by his own count, to explore and document its plethora of cultures.

“This has become the foundation of my art, it is where I found my colors,” he said.

The colors overwhelm the visitor from the moment he steps out of the darkness of the video installation, in the feathers of the peacock angel of the Yezidi religion, the light falling through stained-glass church windows, and the carpets in Anatolian mosques.

In addition to the bold coloring, most of Mr. Gunestekin’s work also bursts out of the canvas in other ways, with elements of sculpture adding a third dimension to paintings.

Photo

Ahmet Gunestekin at work.Credit
Ahmet Gunestekin

Many of his paintings feature a technique in which dark patches of irregular shape obscure some of the colors and figures beneath, evoking the decayed frescoes and mosaics covered by peeling layers of plaster in the many churches that have been turned into mosques around Anatolia, as well as symbolizing the coercive assimilation of other cultures into the prevailing Turkish identity.

Religious motifs abound, especially those common to several faiths, like the legend of the seven sleepers, who slumbered for centuries in an Anatolian cave, or the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son.

The Yezidi peacock angel meets with a snake in the Garden of Eden. In Mr. Gunestekin’s work, beliefs mix and mingle as they have for centuries in Anatolia, where Muslims still pray at the tombs of Christian saints today.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Greek and Mesopotamian mythology provide other recurring themes in the artist’s work, as does the sun, which was worshiped in Anatolia long before monotheism.

“The culture of this region is 6,000 years old,” Mr. Gunestekin said. “It is my purpose as an artist to bring it into the 21st century.”

But in his obeisance to Anatolia and its cultural heritage, the artist has long been at odds with the mainstream of contemporary art in Turkey, which since the founding of the Turkish Republic has looked to the West for inspiration.

“That is the reason why they would never look at me next door,” Mr. Gunestekin said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the neighboring Istanbul Modern Museum, one of several museums of contemporary art in Istanbul that prominent industrialist families have endowed in the last decade.

“They never recognized me as an artist. They said, ‘He is a villager, not an artist,”’ he said of the Turkish art establishment.

“Only now is this attitude beginning to crack,” he said.

Mr. Gunestekin says this exhibition, the largest single artist show ever staged for a Turkish painter, is the turning point in his career.

The change in the tastes of Turkish society comes at a time when Turkey itself has begun to shift away from its founding policy of assimilation in the name of national unity.

In a country where it was considered a crime to acknowledge ethnic or religious differences just a decade ago, Kurdish is now spoken on state television, restored Armenian churches are being reopened by government officials, and Syriac Christians are returning from exile in Europe to rebuild their villages in Anatolia.

“Turkey is living through its most democratic and freest period ever,” said Mr. Gunestekin. “I know some Kurdish politicians do not agree, but I think today’s Turkey is a miracle.”

Still, the turning point may have come too late to save the mosaic of cultures in Anatolia.

“Unfortunately, I am witnessing the end,” Mr. Gunestekin said. “A generation ago, many Yezidis lived in Batman or in Mardin, but today you won’t find a hundred in the whole region.”

“The Syriacs have gone, too, after being robbed of their property and their land and their rights. Peoples who have lived together for hundreds of years have been driven away by intolerance.”

The thought does not stop him from working night and day to churn out prolific quantities of work, sleeping only four hours a night to do so. “If you come from a people that is oppressed and marginalized, you try that much harder to make yourself heard and understood, to be recognized,” Mr. Gunestekin said. “You work harder, you struggle, you produce more, simply to express yourself, to be heard and to be seen.”